“CAUTION, FALLING ROCK.”
The first time I stood over a human body with a severed head, just so happened to be the first time I witnessed a dead human body. There’s something inexplicable, at least in written language, of what you process when you see a decapitation.
I was only 9 at the time, sitting in the center of the middle row of smoke-filled 1990s Jeep. Torn seats, the smell of stale food, and a teenager in the passenger seat smoking a cigarette he’d stolen from his mother’s stash. The driver was his older brother who had just turned 18, and next to me was my little brother and their little brother who was also my age.
We never made it to the fishing spot, surprise, due to what was about to happen…
We were listening to Shania Twain on the radio, laughing about how hot she was *gags*(girls were still annoying and gross), and driving uphill on the curvy road that traced the natural bends of the river in the gorge. It was sunny that day, or at least, that’s how it started out. We then heard a motorcycle behind us rev up and gun around us on the single lane mountain road. Right as he cleared us, about 20ft or so ahead, I saw a bowling ball sized rock right in the middle of our lane.
Happening at the same time, I shouted, “STOP!”, my driver slammed on the brake having already seen what I saw, and the motorcycle hit the mini-boulder. It almost happened in slow-motion: the black lowrider that shot straight up into the air and was spinning. The biker’s body moved in a similar fashion to the laws of nature, but slowly separated flying forward past the bike, still spinning, and landed on the side bank where some jagged rock formations were sharp and protruding. His neck hit first, his body seemed to crumble inward on impact, and then I saw the separation of his head.
As we came to a stop, I jumped out, irrationally thinking I could help him somehow. I ran towards his body but when I saw the gore, I froze. At first I simply gaped at the surreal scene, the my body stumbled backwards a couple steps until I tripped on a pebble. The rest of the story is a bit of a blur, but someone had a carphone behind us, there was crying, confusion, shouting adults, police lights, and the lingering image of his severed head and gore.
I suppose this incident gave me a new perspective and serious consideration to road signs that say, “CAUTION, FALLING ROCK.”
